Purple Flowers

Two weeks after the 1991 Gulf War ceased, among fields of burning oil wells, a little purple flower bloomed, pushing its way through the soot-covered, Kuwaiti desert sand. The flowers were evenly distributed a few feet apart in all directions as far as one could see. A natural history of trial and error sculpted this flower to persist here. In the face of us, regardless of us, ambivalent toward our dirty little war that blackened the world around us with burned oil and littered the landscape with rusted exoskeletons of tanks, humvees, and military vehicles of all kinds, those seeds proceeded to march in their own time. As a reminder to us of the common destiny of all living things, they sprouted, bloomed, and withered away.

The sculpture consists of painted steel flowers supporting a large specimen jar. Inside the jar are two scorpions, one camel spider, and the Kuwait Liberation Medal, preserved in isopropyl alcohol.